When cooking at high heat — stir frying, pan searing, deep frying — it's important to use a fat with a high smoke point, and ideally with a clean, neutral taste that lets the flavor of your food shine. Enter rice bran oil.
While it can be used for drizzling and other cooking applications, rice bran oil is particularly useful for high-heat cooking. In our kitchen, we reach for rice bran oil when stir frying and sautéing. We've seen its smoke point listed from 415°F to 490°F and even higher, making it comparable to, or possibly better than, other vegetable oils like peanut and canola.The flavor and texture are light and clean, so it doesn't overpower the food.
Rice bran oil is extracted from the germ and inner husk, a byproduct of converting brown rice into white rice. It's high in antioxidants and low in saturated fat. There are a lot of health claims being made about rice bran oil, some of which may be overzealous. Studies have shown, however, that it may help lower cholesterol. We still use olive oil in most of our cooking, but for high heat, rice bran oil seems like a good choice.
It's most often available at Asian markets, as well as health food stores and online.
Related: Rice Bran Oil from Steamy Kitchen
(Images: 1. NopparatK/Shutterstock; 2. fiphoto/Shutterstock)
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Hasn't the level of arsenic in a lot of rice been found to be rather high? So much so that we're not supposed to eat it everyday. Does the extracted oil concentrate the arsenic levels even more? Just wondering.
The food booth I worked for uses rice bran oil in their fryer at the market and at most restaurant pop-ups. It's very neutral. One night we did a pop-up at a bar and used their own oil, which I think was peanut - I knew right away that we weren't using our normal oil and the flavor difference was startling, as was the odor when they'd drop stuff in the fryer.
It's my oil of choice. I use it for all my frying and I use it in muffins and other cakes that call for oil instead of butter. But it's australian, and there are no concerns regarding arsenic levels in rice products here.